Climate Change Science and Hurricane Sandy

The devastating hurricane that smashed into New York City, Long Island and New Jersey is likely to be repeated in the future as man-made climate change continues to unfold, experts told the Times Union.

Here is the top of of what ran in Thursday’s paper from experts including New York State Climatologist Mark Wysocki and University at Albany’s Chris Thorncroft, who is chairman of the department of atmospheric and environmental sciences:

In the realm of man-made global warming and climate science, any link to an extreme hurricane, like Sandy, is often described by scientists with a baseball metaphor. A slugger on steroids hits more home runs, but attributing any single home run solely to steroids is not a simple matter.

And asking whether steroids caused a specific home run — or whether climate change is responsible for the massive hurricane that smashed into the Northeast — may be the wrong question to ask. A better question might be: Are such storms becoming more likely than before, and will extreme weather become even more likely in coming years?

To that question, the scientific answer from experts who spoke to the Times Union was: Yes.

After surveying Sandy’s damage this week, Gov. Andrew Cuomo weighed in, declaring that, “Anyone who says there is not a change in weather patterns is denying reality … that’s a whole political debate that I don’t want to get into. I want to talk about the frequency of extreme weather situations, which is not political … There’s only so long you can say, ‘this is once in a lifetime and it’s not going to happen again.’ “